Symposia

• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• Documentation as Relation: Experiments with and Challenges to Knowledge
• Dogs and Their Humans
• Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts
• Food Sovereignty in the Pacific
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

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​​Informal Sessions

• Archiving, Preserving and Sharing Ethnographic Research for the Future
• The After/lives of Pacific Plantations
• ​Complexities of Climate Change
• ​Misinformation, Social Media, and the Anthropocene
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Biculturalities​
• Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific​
• Stories about Birth, Cultural Celebrations, Cultural Observations
• What Matters Now? Navigating Uncertain Futures from Climate Change to Careers

Informal Session: The After/lives of Pacific Plantations

Organizer: Jessica Hardin, Rochester Institute of Technology (jahgss@rit.edu)
Co-Organizer: Hiʻilei Julia Hobart, University of Texas at Austin (hiilei.Hobart@austin.utexas.edu)

What are the Black and Brown after/lives of colonial plantation economies in Oceania? Taking the frameworks of settler colonialism and empire to task as relational, rather than separate, this informal session considers the plantation as a space of confluence. In doing so, we explore differences of economy, racialization, temporality, culture, and politics across the Pacific as well as points of connections that might open possibilities for new solidarities in times of increasing precarity, including food insecurity, medicalization, climate disaster, and rapidly changing COVID worlds. Taking an expansive approach to labor, land, and oceanic movements, we want to think about the ways that the social reproduction of Pasifika lives have been constrained, shaped, and imagined through what has been, and what could yet be, grown, cultivated, and sustained within our “sea of islands.” We encourage contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to archival and ethnographic methodologies. Those interested in participating should contact the organizers.


Short reading list:

Li, Tania Murray and Pujo Semedi. 2021. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone. Durham: Duke University Press.

McKittirck, Kathterine. 2013. Plantation Futures. Small Axe. 17.3: 1-15.

Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin.

Thomas, Deborah. 2019. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham: Duke University Press.

Teaiwa, Katerina. 2015. Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. On Nonscalability: The Living World is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales. Common Knowledge. 18.3: 505-524.